Okay, so I went back and looked at all the threads. Every last one, right back to September 2005. We have about 9000 threads now. A lot of these have more than one cartoon, so I would think we have over 10000 cartoons. Aren't you ashamed?

I only joined in 2007, and also took something of a hiatus in 2009, so there were a lot of toons I had never seen.

Some general comments:

*Sadly, many cartoons are no longer with us. Are there colder words in the English language than "This image or video has been moved or deleted - photobucket" ? Over a thousand spmsmnts have gone to that great 404 in the sky. Maybe I'll never get to see Innocent little girl is being deflorated by two old monsters, and its wonders shall remain forever legend.

*Even sadder is that some of the great contributors are no longer visiting at all. Pixiewolfe, Veepa, mulpis, Chrono Crow, and many others have fallen by the wayside. Maybe they'll come back. Others blossomed and burned out quickly: Eastbayted threw some quality down over the course of a couple of weeks and then was never seen again. Kim the Prodigious Sponge posted a single excellent spmsmnt and never posted again.

*Towards the end of 2006 we were getting around 30 threads a day.

*That Toilet Woman took a hammering during the first year. So did "stock = livestock" jokes, though people seemed to have tired of those now. It was also quite common for people to post several cartoons in one thread, but that has also fallen out of fashion, except in cases where there is a common link between several spamlines.

*I've listed my favourites on my Wiki page. I've been picky, kept it to only a hundred or so. Probably gives a good clue about the nature of my sense of humour. Some authors appear many times.

Ah, I remember when we were getting that massive number of threads all the time. The downside was that most of them were comics of questionable quality, but at least there were new humans coming in. I rather miss that. How comes back in those times we had all sorts of peoples joining up, but since lifting the portcullis there's still been very little in the way of new folks? It's not like Spamusement itself was any less defunct then than it is now.

Also I will admit that I am going to check your wiki page to see if I made it into your favourites. Probably not because most of the comics I posted early on were dreadful. Actually, now I think about it, most of the comics I've posted throughout my career have been questionable. My signature thing was 'obtuse and unfunny'. Hopefully most people don't remember those comics though.

The portcullis that stopped new people registering for a while. Apparently. I'm not entirely clear on that, but I believe it was a last-ditch defence against the tide of spambots. It has been lifted, hasn't it? I'm not entirely clear on that either now.

A lot of people left because of the Great Ratings System Plague of '07. That was specifically designed to cut down on the number of comics submitted. Before that, I might submit upwards of 10 a day. After that, well, I behaved. Mostly.

Several people I communicated with felt that the Rating System Plague diminished the value of submitting anything. Instead of a well-thought-out observation or insight, or even helpful criticism, all you got was a varying bunch of stars. What was good about the drawing? What was bad? Who knew? So there was less incentive, which means I guess that the System worked as designed. I started putting more effort into other areas.

Many Commentors, on the other hand, felt that the Rating System made their job easier.

As to other fluctuating members, sometimes they throb uncontrollably, other times they withdraw and are quiet. Spamusement is just like all other forums on the internet--they're a room where people come and go, talking of Michelangelo. Some people stick around for a long time, others feel burnt out in a rather short time, still others feel that the forum either doesn't meet their needs, or used to but no longer does.

Value is where you find it. I could never draw any kind of hats before I started submitting here. Now I can draw hats pretty well.

ntw3001 wrote:The portcullis that stopped new people registering for a while. Apparently. I'm not entirely clear on that, but I believe it was a last-ditch defence against the tide of spambots. It has been lifted, hasn't it? I'm not entirely clear on that either now.

qster is a recent member, as is enfanta.

Of course, enfanta seems to be very quiet in recent weeks. Too bad, her stuff was exceptionally well drawn.

The people getting kind of bored of the forum and going missing bit always confuses me, just because I'm a member of two forums (or, I should say, have been an actively contributing member on two forums) and have just stuck around. I do miss some of the older posters, Veepa and Bottlecap were always hilarious.

Oh yeah the "portcullis" thing hurt us. About this time last year Mr. F. upgraded the forum to the latest phpBB and supposedly it had better anti-spambot measures so he got rid of the old math question business and just relied on the built-in measures. Well the built-in phpBB anti-bot measures don't work for poopcakes. I eventually turned off automatic authorization of new sign-ups because we were getting up to a thousand or so a day. OK, usually it was just a handful but every now and then they seem to surge. My original plan had been to keep track of the sign-ups and try to figure out the human beings but it was a hopeless task. So the unactivated accounts just kind of piled up.

Once Steven decided to offload the forums I was able to make changes that allowed the automatic process to go again. It's been far more successful than I thought it would, I'm not sure we've had a single bot get through.

OP Tipping wrote:*Sadly, many cartoons are no longer with us. Are there colder words in the English language than "This image or video has been moved or deleted - photobucket" ? Over a thousand spmsmnts have gone to that great 404 in the sky. Maybe I'll never get to see Innocent little girl is being deflorated by two old monsters, and its wonders shall remain forever legend.

Yeah, that's probably the main reason I haven't done this myself. I'd start, but then I'd be all "Okay, why am I wasting my time when most of these early threads lack the strip itself?" and stop.

OP Tipping wrote:*I've listed my favourites on my Wiki page. I've been picky, kept it to only a hundred or so. Probably gives a good clue about the nature of my sense of humour. Some authors appear many times.

Yeah, I guess so. I wouldn't have thought zcompensate would be on a list of favorites. I can probably think of at least a hundred just of my own that I like better. But then, I'm not you, which is probably a good thing for both of us.

I keep thinking that it would be a good idea to have a forum script run every-so-often that caches images linked in the Guest Strips forum, just for posterity. I too did the whole "look at every comic" thing and was dismayed about 25% of the time.

We had talked about a gallery for the spamusements, but PonderThis had made concerns about bandwidth for his site. I might be able to accomodate something like that on my site, but that's a little awkward.

gif wrote:you can't stuff a coin down a stripper's g-string

Judas Maccabeus wrote:Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.

I don't think bandwidth would be a huge problem, because the only time anyone would bother viewing a cached image is when they look for it specifically on the wiki, and its original host doesn't have it anymore.